Sidney Sweeting, DDS

There has been a lot of discussion and concern about the unusual number of Czars that have been appointed by the White House because in most cases it is not clear what powers they have and yet they have not been vetted by Congress. However, from what we are seeing in this series is that those who have been appointed to Cabinet have been vetted, with questions still unanswered.

Timmy Geithner, the new Treasury Secretary, came in as the  indispensable “whiz kid” and “wonder boy”.  Yet we learn that in January, 2009 before his confirmation hearing, he had failed to pay $43,000 in federal self-employment taxes for four separate years and only paid $26,000 of that debt when he was named Obama’s Treasury Secretary-designate. Somehow, this unusually talented man did not catch the lapses. All his cheerleaders dismissed it as a “common occurrence” yet we remember Joe the Plumber , who was crucified for his $1200 tax lien which was sent to the wrong address.

There is more. At the time of his tax-dodging Geithner was employed  by the IMF, which reimburses its employees for their self-employment taxes and is clearly outlined in the tax manual. Much has been made of the fact that he is proficient in Japanese and Chinese so it has been speculated that he would have understood better if the manual had been written in one of those two languages instead of English!. A Senate source confirmed that he pocketed the cash. So he was getting the money to pay for his tax payments that he should have made but had not.

Clearly against the rules. Yet, President Obama stood by his nominee who would oversee the IRS but might not qualify for a lesser job at the agency because he had not followed the rules.

Even the Australian prime Minister was severely critical of the “wonder boy” for his handling of the Indonesian crisis because he had imposed the same cure for Indonesia as the IMF had done for Latin America and Mexico.

He was involved in the bailouts of Bear Stearns ($30 million) and AIG ($153 million).  To quote Malkin “Handsome sums of that taxpayer money went to major financial institutions that had employed Obama’s money men and their closest confidants. Goldman Sachs, for example, raked in nearly $13 billion in December 2009 from AIG in federal TARP funds. It is money the company’s chief financial officer said he did not need or expect.”

Critics had warned that he had a record of “misreading financial crises, pandering to failing banks and playing fast and loose with his taxes..”